TY for the A2A.

Equating the cash handling capabilty of a vending machine with that of ATM is like saying shovel and 80 ft container are the same because they both handle loads.

Vending machine mostly takes coins. If it takes notes, it’s typically just one bill per customer. It dispenses the ordered product and change, if any. It does not issue a receipt. It does not post any transaction on a remote server.

OTOH, a cash accepting ATM machine needs to be designed to handle a huge number of currency notes because it caters primarily to deposits from small businesses dealing in cash (When was the last time you’ve seen a private individual depositing cash into an ATM? I thought so too). A friendly neightborhood store collects around INR 50K in cash, which easily translates into 200–300 bills across various denominations. After it accepts such a high volume, the ATM needs to recognize the denomination of the notes, total up the amount and post the credit on the customer’s account at a remote server and issue a receipt to the depositor. It needs to do all this in near real time. All of that requires a lot of gear.

A bank or whoever installs a cash accepting ATM machine - also called Bunched Note Acceptor or something like that - needs to invest a lot of money in each machine. They need to make sure there’s adequate usage of the machine. Otherwise, it might be cheaper to just continue to handle cash acceptance at a branch.

I personally have no need to deposit cash into an ATM, so I’ve never gone looking for a BNA but I recently got an SMS from a bank that said the bank’s ATM and BNA network would be down for a couple of hours the next day. Since I don’t have any relationship with this bank, I treat this SMS as spam. but, point is, if a bank feels the need to spread the word about outage of its BNA - alongside, admittedly, ATM - network to rank strangers, it could mean that it has a fairly wide network of cash accepting ATMs and finds it judicious to spread the word around far and wide.